The Dutch game developer Excamedia delivers his first game on Android: Jewel Breaker. A quick puzzle game with solid controls.

The first game from a new game developer is always important. It is possible you’ve heard of the name Jewel Breaker before. Not because of this game though – but because of the simple fact that Jewel Breaker is a common name to give to a puzzle game, container jewels that can be broken. This is the first misstep a newly developer can make. This game is practically doomed from the start, because it is very hard to find the game in the Play Store or through search engines, without using ‘Excamedia’, the developers name, along with it.

But once you’ve found and downloaded it, you’ll come across another problem: although the game has a solid base, the gameplay doesn’t stay interesting for too long. In Jewel Breaker you’ll need too, well, break jewels. You do that by tapping the big jewel in the centre of the screen to match the small jewels that are going right for it. Once the colors match, you can break the small ones. When the small jewels hit the big one, it is game over for you. The only aspect that changes during gameplay is the speed and the amount of different colors.

Although that could be enough to entertain for I while, I found myself missing another button. A back button of some sort, where I could change back to the previous color. Now, it is only possible to go ‘forward’. And later on in the game, it is nearly impossible to match the colors, because there simply isn’t enough time to match them. Seems to me like an odd game design decision; the game doesn’t give me the chance to be better at it, by remembering the order of the colors. I just mash the big jewel, hoping to be on time to get the right one.

And that didn’t enhance my experience with the game. Something else that didn’t helped, was the fact that the game looks pretty low budget – the biggest jewel isn’t even in high definition and looks to be made in Paint. Well, not really of course, but that shouldn’t be the level of quality you must aim for as a beginning developer. Jewel Breaker could’ve been a lot better with slightly more time: polish up those graphics, produce a better fitting tune and bring in a back button, and I’m game. But for now, Jewel Breaker only shows us a good base for that game.